Anonymous vows revenge after 15 arrested; AntiSec hacks continue

More Anonymous members have been arrested, this time in Italy. The group has …

After 32 raids across Italy (and one in Switzerland), 15 alleged members of Anonymous have been arrested. The detainees, aged between 15 and 28 with five under 18, have been accused of performing denial of service attacks on Italian Web sites belonging to the government, and on both state and private broadcasters.

The Italian authorities are describing one of the suspects, a 26-year-old Swiss-Italian going by the monkier "Phre," as a "leader" of the hacking group. A further 30 suspects are still being sought.

As was the case with the Anonymous arrests in Spain and Turkey, the AnonOps faction within Anonymous has been swift to both promise revenge and dismiss claims that there are "leaders" of the group.

The AnonOps response ends with a call to arms for other Italian Anons, imploring them to "Let [the government] have it, stronger than ever." In Italy, as with Spain before it, further denial of service attacks are likely to be the chosen response.

Just how these attacks further the notional purpose of AntiSec—attacking security and government installations to uncover corruption and oppression—is less than clear. Though many of the targets are government websites, it's rare for a site to include the kind of sensitive information that might actually be instrumental in furthering such an agenda. Denial of service and defacement may provoke some amount of media coverage, but little more.

Some attacks are a little more focused. IM and VoIP provider Nimbuzz has been targeted, with the account of an administrator apparently compromised. What has Nimbuzz done wrong? According to a document taken from the company, Nimbuzz is willing to cooperate with local governments and block access to its VoIP services. Sometimes, the company even pro-actively blocks access without being demanded to do so. That's not acceptable, according to Anonymous; the group says that it doesn't tolerate censorship.

The very fact that there is an AnonOps group is at odds with the dismissal of the allegation that they have leaders.

Why are they going after all these little players when all the US telcos were complicit in warrantless wiretapping? Whey don't they go hack some AQ websites, or do they not believe in equal rights for women? I'd love to be truly impressed by them, but that'd require something stuxnet-like. That was pretty awesome. Even though it was something where the delivery was purchased. Still pretty dang good. These SQL injections don't represent skill, from what I understand, but just easy exploits. If they had the talent they claim, Wikileaks (who? what have they leaked lately, not so great at managing their leaks for media covereage, what happened with the bank thing?) should be overflowing with USG dox.

Good to see that the spirit of protest (in which people are willing to take a stand for freedom even at the risk of their own) still survives in many parts of the world. It's the only thing that gives me any hope for the future of the internet, as corporations and their puppets in government continue to consolidate their control over it.

I've said it before, but I don't see a problem with organised ddos as protests. I see it as the digital equivalent of a picket line. Hacking is a different matter (to continue the simile there is a difference between picketing a building and breaking in / graffiti-ing it / attempting to occupy it / attempting to burn it down). So I fine with most of what anonymous do.

I think the numbers of simultaneous attacks play in their favor. The piggies only have so many IT guys, the l33t h4x0r have an almost unlimited supply of less than l33t noobs. Just spew a couple DDoS around once in a while so that the piggies can get a few real IPs and save the face.

As far as I am aware the only way to defeat Tor is through traffic shaping. And you gotta know who the target is. Or having enough honeypot nodes in tor to take over the damn thing. Not that people still use Tor anyway

What, you find it hard to believe a 20-something year old demographic of script kiddies might pull much of the Anon membership? Seems like a no-brainer call to me. Perp walks! Yay! Put a DDoS on your rear entry port, you young studs.

Guts? You can't begin to compare these slackers with people who take part in real live marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations. Yeah... virtual guts.

Why are they going after all these little players when all the US telcos were complicit in warrantless wiretapping?

Maybe they are and just haven't made much progress. There is tactical advantage in campaigns for mindshare in releasing information as soon as possible versus waiting to develop the information. While it may not serve the end goal directly or best, it does help. Perhaps that is why they are releasing boring or irrelevant information. "One more boring site wasted, but we're still in the news."

PsionEdge wrote:

Whey don't they go hack some AQ websites, or do they not believe in equal rights for women?

Maybe they are a bit ahead of you and have already figured out that tearists pretty much don't exist. Are you thinking of Taliban? They're far worse.

PsionEdge wrote:

These SQL injections don't represent skill, from what I understand, but just easy exploits.

Maybe you should understand better, first. Easy vector, easy to defend, not always easy to exploit.

TommySch wrote:

Who said sticking it to the man had to be dangerous? You dont script around with the goal of being arrested.

Well, if they are students of Thoreau, they will expect to be arrested. That is the point of his version of civil disobedience. That is probably giving them too much credit, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

chimly wrote:

But... WHO ARE THEY? Does anyone actually know the people under arrest?

It's becoming a common infowars tactic to "arrest" their own agents, giving them sympathy and credibility with their imaginary enemies known as "hackers" (see also: WMDs).

With a little more planning, maybe their agents will be masterminds who subvert entire security vendors' systems instead of DDoS kids who are pretty much the equivalent of Redshirts.

Maybe they will stop when they get older, by the arrest records they are either adolescents or 20 somethings stuck in adolescence. As usual it is the young men who are the cannon fodder for the old leaders. They are going to bring down on themselves the combined weight of international intelligence agencies. It is one thing to sit in your parent's basement and pretend that you are V or Thomas Gabriel and it it is another to be in some filthy interrogation room and feeling helpless.

Well, if they are students of Thoreau, they will expect to be arrested. That is the point of his version of civil disobedience. That is probably giving them too much credit, but maybe I'm wrong about that.

They are performing a useful service. They are revealing the reality of how insecure internet based technologies can be. They should still go to jail or whatever, but their attacks are a nice eye-opener to the unwashed masses